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Basic about VCSA

Industry term for vCenter server appliance is vCSA. VCSA is pre-configured Linux appliance based on SUSE Linux enterprise version 11. A default credentials for VCSA is username/Password: root/vmware.

Good Things

You can deploy vCenter on ESX4.x/ESXi4.x or later

Installation is easy, needs no additional software e.g. AV

License for Windows OS and VC Database is saved

Tuning of OS is not needed

Other agents which run on OS it’s CAPEX and OPEX is saved

Can be easily integrated with AD

vSphere web client is built into it, so no separate installation needed

Te syslog collector is bundled with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and requires no extra setup

Bad Things

IBM DB2 and SQL Server are not supported for VCSA

Linked mode not supported

VSA not supported

IPv6 not supported

vCenter heartbeat not supported

No plug-in support

Embedded database is limited to small inventory

Software and Hardware Requirements

Platform

vSphere4.x or later

Hosts

ESX4.x/ESXi4.x or later

Disk Space

Minimum 7 GB and maximum 80 GB

Memory

8 GB (not sure why this is default memory picked when it is deployed)

CPU

2 vCPU

Network is automatically selected and it is VMXNET3. SCSI controller is LSI logic. All these options are automatically selected. VM hardware is base d on version 7.0 to make it compatible with vSphere 4.x

Memory requirements

4 GB

is the minimum needed for 10 hosts & 100 VM’s –very small inventory

8 GB

is the minimum needed for 100 hosts & 1000 VM’s –small inventory

13 GB

is the minimum needed for 400 hosts & 4,000 VM’s –medium inventory

17 GB

for anything above than 400 hosts and 4,000 VM’s –large inventory

Up to small inventory you can use embedded database but anything other than i.e. medium & large inventory you have only one choice which is Oracle.